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bayonetz

1,020 karma · joined August 1, 2013

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bayonetz··on “I think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements”
In this thread, people making all sorts of claims about print() debugging being better because of speed, efficiency, less overheard, “debuggers are too hard”, etc. on and on, but not actually providing evidence for their claim. For example, how do you know it’s faster for you? Less overheard by what comparison? Like did you give a debugger an equal and fair shot for some appreciable amount of time? I routinely probe these type of assertions from my coworkers about print()’s superiority and find that ~75% of the time, they’ve never given the debugger a fair trial or invested in understanding all it’s strengths and capabilities. ~25% of the time they’ve done a fair comparison and print() debugging is indeed the right choice for their context. Fine. Good for them! Every now and then someone takes me up on teaching them how to use a debugger effectively though and they are almost without exception, albeit begrudgingly, astounded at what they’ve been missing out on only using print().
bayonetz··on Ask HN: What do you do when competition signs up for your service?
Build a shadow ban mode and assign them to it :)
bayonetz··on Competitive programming is useless
Obviously it’s not useless if people find it useful such as the people who compete. By some metric you care about it may be “useless”, but who made you the arbiter of metrics? Competitive programming may or may not correlate with success at say software engineering, but that isn’t grounds to say it’s useless. An Olympic archer may or may not be a terrible bow hunter in the wilderness but they still have a clear skill that is useful by metrics such as people want to watch it, practice it, and compete in it. Dualist thinking like this where things are strictly good/bad, useful/useless, etc. is a really limiting thought pattern. How about instead of “is this thing useful OR useless?” we ask “in what ways is this thing useful? In what ways is this thing not useful? How can we best leverage these properties?”
bayonetz··on Kobra – visual programming language for machine learning
A lot of overlap with Knime and Rapidminer. Why approach it with visual programming vs the direct execution graph approach like they do?
bayonetz··on How to Think for Yourself
If they aren’t “fastidious about truth” probably. If they are, and they know you are being “curious”, you will likely have a cool, engaging conversation on your hands.
bayonetz··on The Return of the 90s Web
Hey, nice comment! Please do this please.
bayonetz··on Police attacks against journalists across the U.S. since May 28
The police are being told by the governors who are being told by the POTUS that the protestors must “dominated”. I’m not editorializing or interpreting here. Listen to Trump himself say it over and over again in the course of this phone call:

https://soundcloud.com/the-daily-beast-politics/trump-audio

I can’t stress how useful it is to hear this context first hand yourself.

bayonetz··on De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
Why would you de-escalate when the POTUS says stuff like this: https://soundcloud.com/the-daily-beast-politics/trump-audio
bayonetz··on [dead]
He's says "you've got to dominate them" like 5 times in the first 10 minutes of the call and he's not distinguishing or nuancing between the different types of protesters or allowing for a range of response. It's all "radical left" and "ANTIFA" to hear him tell it. He doesn't given a single acknowledgment in the whole call that these protests are happening directly because of systemic, pervasive police brutality and therefore some sensitivity and humbleness might also be in order here in responding to the situation. So yeah, chilling.
bayonetz··on [dead]
Absolutely chilling.
bayonetz··on Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
Looked up “HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System)” but didn’t find any good direct hits. Can you point me to some good starting points?
bayonetz··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Please don’t make it infinite scroll instead. Begging you. Please.
bayonetz··on James Damore and three others end Google suit
Nor does it resign them to said biases.
bayonetz··on An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
Disagree. I’m suggesting a better alternative at a contextually relevant time based on personally earned experience.
bayonetz··on An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
Indeed!
bayonetz··on An Update from Robinhood’s Founders
Just use Square’s Cash App! Free stock trades AND you can buy fractional shares AND a bunch of other stuff like P2P payments and bitcoin. I work there and so can say with some authority that we can handle more volume without going down than RH can.
bayonetz··on How to brainstorm great business ideas
Yep, it’s because of all the obnoxious “idea men” out there that try to treat technically skilled makers like ditch diggers who just need to be told where to dig the hole and how big.
bayonetz··on Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?
Meaningness is great. Thanks for that. Such deep concepts expressed so clearly with so few words.
bayonetz··on Saudis Back Travis Kalanick’s New Startup
WeCook? WeChef?
bayonetz··on Query2vec: Search query expansion with query embeddings
Neat! eggie5 and friends, I did something related for Caviar that you might be interested in: https://developer.squareup.com/blog/caviars-word2vec-tagging...
bayonetz··on My company sold for $100M and I got zilch – how can that be?
Genius. Love it.
bayonetz··on Costco gained a cult following by breaking every rule of retail
That stuff is way too salty though with a pretty thin flavor profile. You can at least find liquid stocks with no sodium so you can add a lot of flavor and then salt to taste. Even their reduced sodium version is too salty. Liquid no sodium stocks still aren’t awesome either but I think it’s better overall than the Better than Boulion options.
bayonetz··on Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
I love the man replacement packages like tldr, bro, etc. for exactly these kinds of simple, yet easy to forget incantations.
bayonetz··on The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine
Depends on who you ask though. You have the equivalent of Applebee’s lovers in every country who will tell to go there. You also need to ask them some foodie shibboleths or you’re going to have a bad time.
bayonetz··on CNLabelContactRelation​YoungerCousin​MothersSiblingsDaughter​OrFathersSistersDaughter
Amen. Sometimes it takes what it takes to be precise.
bayonetz··on WeWork Files for IPO
How do you if someone went to Harvard?...don’t worry, they will tell you!
bayonetz··on Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s
False. Algorithmic bias was present from the very beginning. One way or another, directly or indirectly, algorithms only do what people tell them to do.
bayonetz··on Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave
Currently reading David Foster Wallace's collection of essays book titled "Consider the Lobster". I get a similar feelings about the topics of the essays because of his great, quirky-for-journalistic-essay style in them.
bayonetz··on Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave
I expect he will continue to innovate though. To be sure, Kelly's wave is better than BSRs though, just too costly. Give it some time.
bayonetz··on The history of humans trying to reduce one another to a personality profile
The introvert/extrovert dimension is as predictive as the identical dimension in the Big 5. I've made great use of knowing when a colleague, friend, etc. is introvert or extrovert regardless of which test told used. Even if MBTI didn't quite hit the mark historically, I don't see why there are so many haters. It's part of working towards better models. It's a worthwhile pursuit to try to characterize stuff like personality. MBTI is strictly more useful than Astrology just as BIg5 is strictly more useful than MBTI. Future models will surpass these with things like hybrid self-report + neuro-imaging approaches. People really seem to feel threatened by being characterized though. It's a bummer.
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